Gop's Conservatives Come In A Wide Variety Of Flavors

Republicans At Convention Show A Variety Of Conservative Views

HOUSTON — It used to be that if you liked Ronald Reagan and former Arizona Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, you were a conservative. Period.

Not anymore. Now you can be ultra-conservative or conservative light, or lots of flavors in between.

Think of it in terms of Coca-Cola. When Goldwater ran for president in 1964, if you liked Coke, you drank Coke. But since then, because Coke became so popular, the company started making it with and without caffeine, as New Coke and Classic Coke, as Cherry Coke and Diet Coke and Tab.

That's the way conservatism is at this 1992 Republican National Convention. The real thing has branched out.

"I'm a fiscal conservative," said Bryan Anderson, a New Haven alderman, "but on social issues, I take a more liberal view."

"Fiscal conservative?" said a skeptical Sylvia Hellman, a Dallas homemaker. "When you go to the store, you look for bargains, right? That makes you a fiscal conservative."

The real thing, she said, is someone who wants a whole lot more. It's someone who "wants to protect the rights of other people in a moral way."

But Emma Guillory, a political activist from Lake Charles, La., suggests adding a dose of Christianity.

"Our laws are all based on the Ten Commandments," she said, "and we see some of those laws being eroded every day."

Whatever variety you choose, being conservative is as essential as a short-sleeve shirt and a cowboy hat in these parts this week. The GOP has won the last three presidential elections by running unabashedly conservative candidates, and no one's about to yell "liberal" in the crowded Astrodome.

Analysts believe that the party may indeed have found the perfect way to peddle a popular product.

"More people think of themselves as conservatives than anything else," said Andrew Kohut, president of Princeton Survey Research in New Jersey. His polls show that a majority of voters consistently say they are conservative.

It's a big change from the 1960s, recalled Phyllis Schlafly,

leader of the anti-abortion forces at the convention and a longtime GoldwaterReagan adviser.

In the 1950s and 1960s, she said, "we used to avoid being pigeonholed as conservatives."

The label was poison for two reasons -- it often was identified as being against civil rights, and Goldwater, the father of the modern conservative movement, was drubbed in his 1964 presidential bid.

In that election, Democrats painted Goldwater as a trigger-happy warrior eager to involve the country in a nuclear war. And they colored his civil rights views as the type that would undo all the progress racial minorities had made in the previous decade.

But there was a deeper philosophical underpinning to Goldwater, one expressed in his writings and developed by noted conservative thinkers of the day.

It was a feeling, said Alabama Gov. Guy Hunt, that the federal government was too intrusive. Conservatives argued that government money was too freely used to guarantee people an income and a job, and that government was too eager to tell people what their children should learn or where they should live.

That foundation was waiting when history stepped in to help.

The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- the unpopular Vietnam War, the resignation of Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal, gasoline lines and high inflation -- helped make the federal government less and less popular.

That sick-of-Washington feeling contributed mightily to the 1976 election of outsider Jimmy Carter, but Carter believed government should be more responsive and compassionate, not necessarily smaller.

It took Ronald Reagan to take Goldwater's formula and voters' uneasiness and brew them into a winning mix.

"He personified conservatism," Schlafly said, "and with his personality, he made it attractive and acceptable."

At the same time, throughout the 1970s, Reagan got some outside help. Liberalism was becoming the New Coke of its day, the stuff no one wanted.

Kohut recalled how liberalism was stigmatized by its connection with counterculture values that many feared -- children out of wedlock, homosexuality, drug use and so on.

Reagan's 1980 triumph cemented conservatism as an advantage.

This year, there are many varieties. There is Connecticut conservatism -- state Republicans define themselves in the same way state Sen. William H. Nickerson of Greenwich does:

"I believe in a balanced budget. I believe in restrained spending. I am an economic conservative," he said.

That means keeping taxes low, so people can have more money to spend and invest. It means backing government programs that provide incentives to companies to create jobs and help poor people find work.

It does not mean, said Andrea Scott, a House clerk from New Haven, "the kind of government handout programs we had in the 1960s."

And it does not mean being a social or Christian conservative.

The social conservative agrees with the Connecticut people on fiscal matters, but believes government's helping hand has been stretched to ridiculous limits.